A few months ago we used theStory Forge Cardsto come up with a story outline for Film Noir. Several of us in our writing group each looked at the same card layout and created individual stories.Three stories already been posted. Our group decided we should test out Story Forge to aid in writing poems. Below is the outcome. Take a look and let us know what you think. We continue to enjoy experimenting with Story Forge Cards. It is a good process to generate story or poem ideas.

A Web of Lies

The ring was not lost
He finally realized
Like pieces fit together in a puzzle,
His wife had strung a web of lies

The 3 Karat platinum diamond ring
Was pawned to pay her gambling debt.
Totally different version from her story
It was in the shop for a cleaning and reset

The past six months of the marriage
Had been very lonely for him.
He begged her to come home early;
She argued overtime was best for them.

What she did not account for
Was the circle of friends in his life.
The pawn shop attendant, his fraternity brother,
Immediately knew she was his wife.

Although the attendant was held into secrecy
By his company’s code of conduct rules.
He had experienced a similar hurt
And didn’t want his brother made into a fool.

The brothers maintained a bond
Since their time together serving in Germany.
We fight each other’s battles,
In the air, on land, and sea.

With clarity of her lies
He left the marriage; divorced his wife.
She sunk into a deep depression
And with no hope in sight, she took her life.

English: Thomas Nast’s most famous drawing, “Merry Old Santa Claus”, from the January 1, 1881 edition of Harper’s Weekly. Thomas Nast immortalized Santa Claus’ current look with an initial illustration in an 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly, as part of a large illustration titled “A Christmas Furlough” in which Nast set aside his regular news and political coverage to do a Santa Claus drawing. The popularity of that image prompted him to create another illustration in 1881. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot…

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.

He had a broad face and a little round belly,

That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,

And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!”

—from “A Visit from St. Nicholas”

I suppose it was only a matter of time. In an age where fitness gurus saturate the airwaves and Scandinavian policymakers are calling for bans on butter in schools, it shouldn’t be too surprising that someone would take aim at that nefarious corrupter of public morals: Santa Claus.

The Associated Press recently reported that author Pamela McColl mortgaged her house and spent 200,000 of her own Canadian dollars to publish and promote a reworking of Clement Clarke Moore’s classic poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (otherwise known as “Twas the Night Before Christmas”). Only the new version bowdlerizes some lines McColl deems objectionable: “The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, / And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.”

The dust jacket of McColl’s book also includes a letter from Santa stating that “all of that old tired business of smoking” is behind him, and that out of respect for animals, his clothing is now made from faux fur. The book has been praised by groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics. However, the American Library Association views McColl’s work as nothing less than censorship.

Apparently, McColl’s animosity towards tobacco began when she was eighteen years old and had to pull her father out of his burning bed after he’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. Of course like many anti-vice crusaders, she was a smoker herself when she was young but later kicked the habit. (As my grandpa used to say: “There’s nothing worse than a reformed drunk.”)

Personally, I find McColl’s fixation on Santa’s pipe a bit amusing. I remember the illustrated edition of Moore’ classic poem that my mother read to me as a child—complete with a painting of Mister Claus puffing on a big-bowled Meerschaum while enjoying a brief respite from his night’s busy labors.

Apart from Middle Earth and Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Devil Anse Hatfield, pipe smokers are pretty much a dying breed these days. So the idea that Santa is somehow inspiring a new generation of toddlers to light up a briar is naive at best, and it is yet another example of political correctness gone awry. So what’s next? Non-fat, sugar-free sugar-plums? Safety guardrails on rooftops and chimneys? A flame-retardant suit for old Saint Nick? Or how about a worldwide ban on wood-burning fireplaces?

If McColl had her way, she’d likely have Santa on a regimented exercise plan to trim away that unhealthy layer of flab around his mid-section. But then again, she’s probably the sort of person who thinks that rewriting Huckleberry Finn for a modern audience is a good idea, too.

“The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own.” —Leo Stein, American art collector and critic

In an 1817 letter to a friend, the poet John Keats describes one of the qualities that makes writers like Shakespeare so great: negative capability. Keats defines this trait as “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, this is the ability to sublimate one’s own individual assumptions about the world and write about uncertain (or potentially polarizing) topics in such a way that the author’s own views remain unknown. It is also the recognition that there are often grey areas in life which cannot be resolved through rational means. This requires an extraordinary degree of objectivity, and it’s much harder than it seems.

To enter into the mind of other people (or things) and speak from their point of view is an essential goal for writers, and certainly Keats demonstrates this skill in “Ode to a Nightingale,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and “Ode On a Grecian Urn.” Often some of the most engaging literary works are those where there is no clear side taken on contentious issues (such as the free will versus predestination dichotomy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex). But the question is, how can writers break free from their own personal perceptions and approach subjects from a more objective point of view? Consider these strategies:

1. Read writers who are good at negative capability. I’ve mentioned Keats, Shakespeare, and Sophocles. But there are plenty of other notable authors, such as Emily Dickenson, William Wordsworth, Anne Rice, Walt Whitman, and John Updike.

2. Learn to view situations from other people’s perspectives. Imagine not what you would do if you were facing their circumstances, but rather think about what they would do and why.

3. Step into the unknown. Force yourself to write about subjects or situations you are uncomfortable with (or know little about).

4. Write in a new genre. Tell a familiar tale in a different format. For example, if you normally write short stories, turn your narrative into a poem (or vice versa). Or you could try turning a poem into a screenplay (or vice versa). Different literary conventions require different sensibilities, and this can lead to breakthroughs in our perceptions of subjects.

One of the joys of reading is having the opportunity to experience situations from someone else’s perspective. To do this convincingly, writers must learn to put aside their own ideas about the world and imagine alternative possibilities. This is terra incognita for many people, but by embracing this approach, you may discover new avenues of creative potential.

Starting out as a young writer I never wrote stories. Poetry was more my speed. And as a young poet I wrote my share of really, really bad poetry complete with awkward rhymes and sappy subject matter. But somewhere in my junior year of high school I was introduced to a poet that changed my writing forever. That poet was Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the poem that changed my life was called “Sometime During Eternity”.

Sometime During Eternity

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hep
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
ninteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter

You’re hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is THE king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it

Only he don’t come down
from His Tree

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This poem blew my young Catholic mind. What genius to take the story of Jesus and translate it into Beatnik terms. I was hooked. From then on I immersed myself in the Beats: Corso, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady, among others. I began to experiment with my own style. I embraced free verse, finally breaking free of the constraints of traditional poetry. The subject matter I explored became more sophisticated and more dark. Reading the poem by Ferlinghetti opened up a whole new world of writing to me. I felt I had finally found my voice. To this day my poetry still carries the mark of the Beats.

If you haven’t read it and even if poetry isn’t really your thing, I highly recommend Ferlinghetti’s poetry book A Coney Island of the Mind. It is a truly inspired piece of writing. And I am a firm believer that everyone needs to read Ginsberg’s “Howl” at least once before they die. This is poetry at its most raw and powerful. How can you go wrong with an opening line that reads:

I often wonder if I would have continued writing poetry had I not found “Sometime During Eternity”. Quite honestly I wonder if I might still be Catholic. That poem caused me to look at a whole lot more than just poetry with new eyes. It affected me deeply and isn’t that the point of poetry?

I love poetry, and as a high school English teacher, I would like my students to enjoy it as much as I do. While this may be an inherently futile endeavor, I continue to fight the good fight anyway and make pitches for my favorite poems and poets. If I’m lucky, the students who’ve learned to hate poetry may come to dislike like it perhaps a little bit less. At the very least, I try my best to repair the damage done by their former (albeit well-meaning) teachers who managed to drive the love of verse out of my students somewhere between kindergarten and junior high.

One thing my school did this year to promote the enjoyment of poetry was participate in “Poem In Your Pocket Day,” an exercise sponsored by Poets.org and The Academy of American Poets. The idea is simple. On Thursday, April 29, students are encouraged to keep copies of their favorite poems in their pockets to share with friends, teachers, co-workers, and family. Our school librarian even organized a prize drawing for students who showed their poems to their English teachers.

The results of the event were both interesting and encouraging. First of all, more than a quarter of my students carried poems with them to class—a much higher percentage than I anticipated. Some of the poems were classics, others were written by contemporary authors, a few were song lyrics (a valid form of poetic expression, in my opinion). The encouraging thing was that students seemed genuinely excited about sharing their poems with their classmates, and most insisted on reading the poems aloud so that the words could have maximum impact. Perhaps poetry as an art form is not dead after all.

Writing is Cake?

This blog is a loose collection of posts, stories, wisdom, and ideas from a writing group based out of Phoenix, Arizona. The name comes from our constant struggle to convince ourselves writing is easy.
And, hey, who doesn't like cake?